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DISPUTES FOR BUSINESS

Often the costliest part of resolving a dispute is the time spent dealing with it instead of running your business. In each case how you manage the dispute may vary, however there are some key steps you can follow to handle the issue and retain good business relationships.

You are much more likely to face litigation through one of these five types of business disputes:

1. Partnership Disputes

Everything starts out great when you begin the partnership. Then one of you argues that you deserve more of the profits than are being shared. Or perhaps one of you wants to leave the partnership and take the rights to a product with them. Maybe one of you believes the business should spend more on marketing while the other believes more money should be spent on research and development. There are many reasons these partnership disputes can arise, and they are rarely simple issues.

2. Shareholder Disputes

Shareholders have a vested interest in how a business is run. If the leadership is making mistakes in managing the business, the shareholders may suffer a loss of profit. Shareholders may worry that certain decisions will have a negative impact on the business, and, as a result, they may decide to act before they suffer the losses. Therefore, shareholders may bring a lawsuit against the business or its executives for mismanagement or other misconduct resulting in financial losses.

3. Employment disputes

Employees may claim they were fired for an illegal reason, such as discrimination. Contract employees may sue their company if they feel their contracts were violated, such as failure to pay according to the contractual agreement. Other employees may sue over unsafe working conditions, a hostile working environment, or the denial of benefits.

4. Breach of Contract

Contracts cover just about every aspect of your business, including vendor and supplier relationships, employment, mergers and acquisitions, shareholder agreements, franchise agreements, and much more. But just because you have something in writing doesn’t mean that everyone will do what they said they were going to do in that contract. You might have to bring legal action to get those parties to live up to their contractual obligations.

Breach of contract can also occur when people disagree about how to interpret the contract. People may think they are behaving within the terms of the contract, but you may think they are not. Other breach of contract issues may involve people knowingly withholding information, engaging in illegal activity, or a change of circumstances that make it impossible to honour the contract. Litigation may be necessary to resolve these disputes. The types of breaches that can occur are unlimited and dependent on the type of contract involved (i.e., business to business contracts, business to customer contracts, business to employee contracts, business to supplier/vendor contracts, etc.).

5. Customer Disputes

These cases arise from customers suing businesses over their defective products, mistreatment they received, or false claims. These are not your typical customer complaints that they take to the manager. These are serious disputes that may involve large amounts of damages.

 

How to help you managing a dispute?

a. Compile your facts and evidences

Document the key details of the dispute. This could include dates, times, product or service details, warranties, photographs, leases, agreements or contracts and a summary of discussions or previous correspondence between the parties.

b. Keep calm and remain objective

Avoid abusive or emotional language or laying blame.

c. SEEK ASSISTANCE

As you are unable to resolve the dispute by yourself, you should seek assistance.

Good legal advice can help you protect your business interests and comply with legal obligations.

d. How do we help you?

 PMCG specialises in business disputes conducted either by “out of court” settlement solutions as well as in a litigation environment, always maintaining an open minded perspective open to creative solutions that will restore restore your business relationship, hence maintaining value.

If negotiation doesn’t work, the final option will then be to proceed to litigation.

Our goal is minimizing your liability, no matter what path we must take through the legal process.

Contact us today to discuss the details of your business dispute and find out how our dedicated business attorneys can help you.